My Kickstarter delivered December 2021 against a September 2021 estimate, three months late, which by this hobby’s standards is basically same-day shipping. I backed it off the art alone, that rubbery 1930s cartoon aesthetic, all bendy limbs and exaggerated expressions, and it turned out to be doing more thematic work than I expected.

This is, structurally, Kingdom Death Monster’s showdown boss battle with the campaign-management overhead stripped out. You and your townsfolk take on an escalating series of boss fights across an evening instead of across months, and that’s the actual pitch, a KDM-style boss battler you can finish in a single sitting rather than a lifestyle commitment. I’ve seen this called “a simplified Kingdom Death Monster boss battle game” as a knock, and for anyone who wants KDM’s full depth that’s fair, but for me the tradeoff is exactly right.

Teaching it runs about ten minutes for setup and maybe fifteen to get the combat flow understood, which is remarkable given how much theme is packed into every card. My two-player games use the “Doublin’ Down” variant, each player running two townsfolk instead of one, and I’d recommend that over straight 2p from the box, it fixes a pacing issue where two characters alone against these bosses can feel outmatched.

The rulebook is the real weak point, genuinely well-written for what’s actually in it, but there’s a comprehensive-glossary-shaped hole where questions about ruffian movement and pushing mechanics keep coming up at the table with no clean answer. My first playthrough at two players ran over four hours before we’d learned to stop overthinking every card, and that’s longer than the box copy implies.

Four stars. The miniatures are genuinely a joy to paint if that’s your thing, the theming is consistent front to back, and it delivers the KDM boss-battler feeling without asking for a KDM-sized chunk of your life.